John Borrego–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Community Studies

The best way to communicate my theory and practice about teaching is to provide a nuts and bolts description of how I teach one of my classes. The class I have selected is entitled Global Capitalism and Community Restructuring (CMMU 100D & 100X). This class is one of the entry points/interest areas within the community studies major and explores how two communities in North America are linked through both the migration of capital and the migration of labor.

The idea is to conduct a comprehensive study of one of the communities, Watsonville/Pajaro Valley, from as many perspectives as possible. Students are initially introduced to the community in groups of four to six through a tour led by me or a local person who has taken the class and is very knowledgeable of the dynamics of the community. We hold discussions on what we saw and what issues and questions emerged for people. We undertake and discuss extensive reading about the globalization of capital and its impact on communities. Each session becomes more focused on how these processes impact on the Pajaro Valley and Watsonville. Based on interests, we cluster students into teams of about three people, with each team exploring a problem or issue through field study within the community. They do field trips, interview people within that sector of the community, and gather as much information as possible about what is going on around that issue. The teams share their findings at several stages over the quarter. They help each other out, comment on each other's findings and insights, and contribute to increasing each other's breadth and depth of understanding about how macro process (restructuring of global capital and global migration) and micro process (daily life in Watsonville) are interrelated.

Parallel to this in-class and field trip/field study activity, we have meetings in Watsonville every Wednesday evening, in my living room, for a three-hour seminar with people from the community. The guest list changes from year to year, reflecting the dynamic nature of the community. This year the seminar's featured guests were: a teacher, author, activist; a commercial strawberry grower; an organic grower; the principal of Watsonville High School; the Executive Director of the Local Area Formation Committee (LAFCO); Watsonville's City Manager; the executive director of Defensa De Mujeres; the executive director of Salud Para La Gente; and the vice mayor of the Watsonville City Council. We also attended a special sesssion of the Watsonville City Council. These same people offer to talk to the students outside of the evening seminar, do additional interviews, and often lead their own field trips into the community.

It is at this point in the class that the teams takes off in their learning. They realize that they are doing original research and that they are coming to know the community of Watsonville in profound ways. It is here that they begin to understand the power of doing field study, of finding out how things really work. On the one hand they uncover extreme social injustice and uneven development, and at the same time they experience the drive for social change within the community of Watsonville. They come face to face with the people who benefit from how things are currently organized politically, economically, and socially, as well as with those who benefit from that social structure of accumulation. They also come face to face with people who are trying to change the way the social system works. Here they come to understand that the investigative work that they are doing is also integrally linked to the process of social change.

The class on campus and the seminar in the community become linked like two strands in a double helix. There is also a dramatic shift of energy out into the community where students are doing their field work and interviews. More and more the class discussions are about what is happening in Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley in response to global, national, and regional forces. The process adds a third strand, the community. The on-campus class, the community seminar, and field work in the community become a three-strand learning environment.

The teams and their focus change every year depending on the students and the conditions in the community. This year's teams wrote up their findings and produced a collective community study entitled "The Globalization of Capital and Its Impact on Watsonville." The team reports were on: Land Use in the Pajaro Valley; Flower Pots and Facades: The Economic Development of Watsonville; Labor in Watsonville; The Balance: Affordable Housing - Economic Development - Open Space; Watsonville City Politics and Watsonville Politics: Millennium High School; Watsonville High School; Health Care in Watsonville; Youth Issues in Watsonville; Transformation to a More Sustainable Agriculture in the Pajaro Valley. These team studies were presented to a panel made up of seven people from the community of Watsonville. Four of these panelists had presented at the Wednesday evening seminar--the principal of Watsonville High School, an organic farmer and member of California Association of Family Farmers (CAFF), the executive director of the Local Area Formation Committee, and the vice mayor of the Watsonville City Council. Three were new and represented a fresh audience within the community for the findings. They included the director of the Community Action Board (CAB) and member of Wetlands Watch, the executive director of Pajaro Valley Housing Corporation (PVHC), a former director of FENIX and current organizer with the UFW. (Each year the composition of the panel varies widely.)

On a Saturday morning during the first week of the following quarter we met at the Watsonville Senior Center. The class teams had a spirited discussion for four hours with these seven key people from the community of Watsonville about what is happening and how things work in their community. There was disagreement and support on the panel for the findings of the studies. However, the most important point was that the students were on very solid ground because their findings were grounded in their own field study within the community. The discussions were at a very high level and demonstrated that the students had rapidly come up to speed about how things work in the community of Watsonville. They had unearthed that which was hidden from view, and they had explored the implications of global economic power in a local community. This is the point of the seminar, to learn how to do a community study so that the entire process can serve as a template to be improved in the development of new community studies during the students' full time field placements.

Each year, I ask one student who has taken the class and completed the full-time field study and the analysis of the field study experience to assist me in the teaching of the next class. This linkage to the students has been invaluable in providing a strong bond to the class. It is also important to acknowledge the integral linkage between my own research and teaching in this class. The class is related to an ongoing (for five years) study by myself (with Patricia Zavella of UCSC) which was originally funded in 1995/96 by the California Policy Seminar at UC Berkeley and continued with additional funds from UC Nexus and the Division of Social Sciences at UCSC. That study began as an analysis of the restructuring of food processing in North America and its impact on Watsonville and Irapuato; it is built on intensive fieldwork in the Pajaro Valley and the Bajio Valley and is currently being developed into a book-length manuscript. Watsonville provides an ideal case for understanding the relationship between macro processes (global capitalism) and micro processes (daily life).

This year is the fifth time that Global Capitalism and Community Restructuring has been offered and each time the class builds on the previous production of studies and insights. The class changes each year because the conditions at all levels of analysis are changing. The dynamics and notions of global capitalism are changing rapidly, as is the relationship between the US and Mexico. As well, the macro forces impacting on the Pajaro Valley are rapidly changing so that local attention shifts from a focus on plant closures five years ago to the current concerns over the impact of the labor intensive strawberry industry on housing and social services, to the impact of the overflow housing and office space demand from the dynamic high technology Silicon Valley. These forces have shaped vastly different community studies.

The above pedagogy is very simple. Use field work in local communities to learn what is going on locally and in the larger world. Integrate intellectuals from the local community in the teaching/learning process. Encourage the students to find out what is happening for themselves through local political economic analysis and ethnographic work. Get the students to reflect back onto the community what they have learned and get the community to correct them and improve their understanding. In turn, encourage the community to learn from the students who bring new fresh views and beginners' minds. This process engages the students as outsiders with different segments in the community in an interactive process of education. This to me is a very powerful process for teaching in community studies. This is an example of how I approach the teaching of all of my classes.